Our Thinking

Many teams, including ours, are doing 2024 planning right now.

It’s the time to look ahead at what’s going to drive the business: where to focus, what to invest in, and whether to double down on what’s working or change course.

You know what also happens in Q4 and in Q1 of the next year? Big technology and infrastructure investments.

Next year will likely see continued economic and political instability. And likely even more things will compete for priority and budget. If you’re like many of our clients, you’re building the business case for why you need to invest in your CRM or growth platforms.

Since we specialize in HubSpot – a growth platform and CRM – we’ve developed a primer to help you make the business case for implementing or optimizing it in 2024.

What exactly is a business case?

A business case “demonstrates how the chosen technology or solution will meet stakeholder expectations and organizational priorities and drive business outcomes.” This excellent Gartner article breaks down what should be included to “show the full value of the purchase across costs, value and risk, and convey that value through simple but compelling storytelling.”

So when it comes to HubSpot, here’s what you need to include in your business case.

The status quo is not sustainable

You are making a business case for change. You first need to think about the current state of operations. How are things currently working? What’s broken? What can be fixed? Can we continue working the way we did before? Why do we need to change things right now?

Consultants refer to this as a burning platform. Ugly metaphors aside, you need to break down the situation accurately in order to set the stage. Be specific – what is it costing the company in terms of lost sales, lost productivity, or even morale? In other words, what are the exact things that will be solved by investing in HubSpot?

You’ll need this to answer these questions:

• Do the benefits of making this change outweigh the risks?
• What would happen if we did nothing?

Think about your stakeholders

No matter what size your company, the business case must take into account the areas that will be impacted most by this investment. Your desire to invest in HubSpot will compete alongside their investments in staff, other tools, and each team’s operating budget.

In our experience, investing in a tool like HubSpot usually starts with a pain point for one specific person or team. It could be the marketing team wants to use automation for onboarding, nurture, or lifecycle campaigns. Or a salesperson might want it to improve their outbound sales process. 

But as a holistic tool that works across all customer-facing and back office teams, it’s vital that you break down the benefits for each team. And understand the potential roadblocks for each team.

Making the case to Sales

“Products are sold, not bought,” one of our Sales clients said. Sales teams typically value high performing and connected sales people. HubSpot can act as a wingperson to close process gaps, supercharge a salesperson’s impact, and provide greater visibility and accountability.

Sales benefits to include in your business case:

• Sales pipeline management – visualizing and optimizing sales stages to look for barriers and accelerators.
• Customer insights – using customer data for personalized outreach.
• Forecasting – improve sales predictions and revenue forecasts.
• Sales efficiency – using tasks, sequences, and more to accelerate deal velocity and overall effectiveness.
• Sales performance analytics – track performance of the team to identify areas for improvement.

Making the case to Marketing

As marketing continues to become more data-driven, HubSpot brings your company’s omnichannel strategy together. Most importantly, it puts marketers on the same page as sales and enables everyone to see what leads turn into closed and recurring business. 

Marketing benefits to include in your business case:

• Lead management – enhancing lead tracking and nurturing.
• Campaign effectiveness – measuring ROI of marketing campaigns.
• Customer Segmentation – personalizing marketing efforts to improve relevance and performance.
• Tool consolidation – many single-use tools can be integrated or eliminated by using HubSpot.

Making the case to Customer Success or Account Management

It’s vital that you don’t start from scratch once a prospect becomes your customer. HubSpot offers Service Hub alongside Sales and Marketing Hub. While some standalone platforms like Zendesk offer fantastic features, managing these in separate siloes comes with limitations and additional costs.

Customer Success or Account Management benefits to include in your business case:

• Most standard functions, such as knowledge base, tickets, chatbots and email support, are available in HubSpot Service Hub.
• Streamlining systems can reduce overall spend.
• Improved customer experience through greater employee collaboration and institutional intelligence.

Making the case to Operations or Finance

Now we get to the most important group: those focused on the bottom line. The traditionally risk-averse and conservative people in Ops and Finance don’t care about features. It’s about quantifying what money will be saved once these problems are solved. 

Ops and Finance benefits to include in your business case:

• Cost-benefit analysis: what exactly will be gained once HubSpot is in place? Work to put a dollar figure on other technology costs, increased win rate, less churned customers etc. It’s often helpful to plot both short-term and long-term gains.
• Reduction in operational costs: in today’s market we are all trying to do more with less. Ensure your business case includes how team members will increase productivity through automations, AI, and other efficiencies in HubSpot.
• ROI projections: For the amount you propose investing into HubSpot, when will this pay off? Getting to a specific date, with possible headwinds and complications, will make your case airtight. HubSpot’s ROI Calculator could help you here.

Tying it all together

Prove it with case studies and references

Come armed with examples of how HubSpot solved a similar problem for another company, along with the quantifiable results. HubSpot has been a leading solution for 10+ years, and their case study database might give you a slam dunk.

Get a HubSpot Solutions Partner to ensure you’re successful

The question “Ok, but who’s going to actually implement or optimize HubSpot for us?” is going to come up. “Don’t worry – we’ll get an expert” should be your answer.

Not only will a HubSpot Solutions Partner ensure you follow best practices, they will give you cost and timeline certainty. Be sure to bring in a Solutions Partner like Inflectiv early to develop a budget for inclusion. Plus they may also have their own case studies you can include in your business case.

Best of luck!